How Many Times Will You See Your 30 Favorite People Before You Die?

One of the measures of a happy and well-lived life is how much time you spend with people you really care about - your favorite people. I initially stumbled onto this concept at the site See Your Folks, which tabulates how many times you will see your parents before they die. Spoiler alert - it’s probably a lot fewer times than you think if you live far away from them and probably fewer than you think even if you live between an hour and two hours away from them. This drove home that, in fact, I needed to make a real effort to see my parents every year because time is shorter than I think.

I made a list of about 30 friends I really love spending time with and then calculated how often I had seen them in the last year. The number was shockingly low.

Because I am far too busy with writing projects, consulting for startups, traveling and speaking, I rationalized, I will see them more when life settles down. Then I quickly realized this is an excuse. My inner voice said, “Alex, there is no good reason not to set aside other activities (aside from family) to spend time with friends laughing, talking, listening to music - living.”

So I took this question a step further and did the math; how many times would I see these people before I died? In many instances, at my current rate of visiting and spending time, the number was less than 10 times. For a good number of those folks - some of my dearest college friends - the number was actually five or less.

Humans are experts at expanding the amount of time we think we have. We struggle to envision our own death. We rarely account for our lives and the way we spend time in any sort of rational fashion. In the past decade, the proliferation of screens and our unconscious and semi-conscious consumption of email, the Internet, video games and other forms of electronic media has supplanted many forms of in-person interactions. And the presence of smartphones has stunted and warped in-person interactions on the rarer instances when they do occur. That’s not to say electronic media is terrible but left unchecked, it will eat your real-life friendship time.  

Life truly just happens. That’s largely because we let it happen, rather than guide it. I printed out the list of people that I want to see and I’m making a concerted effort this coming year to see half of them at least once. That may sound like a small step but for me, it’s pretty ambitious. I do spend a lot of time with my family and my work is important to me. I can’t drop everything and do a “Round The World Friends Tour”. Be that as it may, that very tour is now on my bucket list of goals to accomplish in the next five years.  

So this coming year, I have added a new question to my bullet-list diary that I intend to ask myself every night when I journal; Did you make plans this week with any of your very favorite people? If I can answer affirmatively at least twice per month, then I’m on the right path.

Author Note: Some of this column came from thoughts I had while writing the forthcoming book “Your Happiness Was Hacked: Why Tech Is Winning the Battle to Control Your Brain--and How to Fight Back” which I wrote with my writing partner and good friend Vivek Wadhwa (whom I plan to see more often).